mc79hockey.com

Scoring Chances for NHL Game Number 21026

Ted Leonsis has a lot to say about Alexander Ovechkin getting ejected from the Capitals game against the Blackhawks yesterday:

When Ovechkin was tossed for basically pushing a Blackhawk player I received a bunch of emails. Some from our fans, some from Pens fans, and some from fans in Chicago. Suffice to say the opinions about the play ranged all over the map. I don’t think Alex should have received a game misconduct for that play. I don’t think he should miss our next game either. Matt Cooke didn’t get suspended or a penalty called on his hit last week, but Alex Ovechkin the league’s MVP did on that play? I don’t get it. But it is what it is. We will move on, play hard and we won’t “explain or complain”.

The last sentence would be a little more stirring if he hadn’t spent the rest of the paragraph complaining. He also loses marks for the inexplicable quotation marks, but that’s a personal peeve.

Read the rest of this entry »

There are certain parallels between the Kansas City Royals and Edmonton Oilers that go beyond analytically inclined fans (possibly because both Kansas City and Edmonton offer little to do beyond obsess over the circumstances of the local sporting concern). Neither franchise has been particularly relevant since the salad days in the 1980’s, both franchises have a history of clumsy totalitarian actions when criticized and neither has particularly innovative management at the moment. Rany Jazayerli summed up my experience as an Oilers fan a few months back when he wrote:

I can’t keep writing five-thousand-word screeds every time Moore makes the Royals the laughingstock of baseball, and besides, I’m at the point where I’m repeating myself every time I write about a player acquisition. It’s hard not to repeat myself when the Royals keep repeating themselves.

Still, as a general rule of thumb, any time the Royals make a move that inspires friends to send emails of condolences and #royalsfail to become a trending topic on Twitter, I have to write something.

If there’s a distinction to be drawn between the Oilers and the Royals, it’s that the Oilers are a rather wealthy team at the moment, if a bad one. The owner says that the general manager (whoever that might really be) is free to do what he wants to make the team better. With that in mind, I thought I’d point out how a wealthy team could do some rebuilding through restricted free agency.

Read the rest of this entry »

Scoring Chances for NHL Game Number 21007

Scoring Chances for NHL Game Number 20995

I’ll say it again - if you aren’t following people on Twitter, you’re missing some fairly entertaining interactions.

Joffrey Lupul: “Hitting people in the head w/ ur shoulder is part of NHL hockey. We’re big boys. Discuss..”

Now, this is particularly funny, given that Lupul basically goes out of his way to avoid the risk of taking a hit. I’m convinced that he slows up when he’s going to be first to the puck but at the cost of taking a hit or at least that he did in Edmonton. The kind of game he plays - he’s not a puck carrier - means that he’s probably at less risk of actually taking a shot to the head than most forwards. Easy for him to declare that that should continue to be a risk, when he doesn’t actually run it.

Of course, when TSN’s Gino Reda chimed in, it got weird:

Read the rest of this entry »

Scoring Chances for NHL Game Number 20972

One of the reasons I’m not wild about Canadian politics is that I see it taking on an increasingly American bent in terms of law and order issues. Federally, the Conservatives don’t care about evidence based policy, the Liberals are terrified of being painted as soft on crime and the NDP is irrelevant. Mandatory minimum sentences are an example of an American policy that’s creeping into Canada. Radley Balko’s written a lot about civil forfeiture in the United States, which is a process by which the state can lay claim to assets that it believes are associated with crime. It’s rife with problems in the United States - in many states, the agency seizing the assets gets a cut of the return, which creates an incentive for agencies to run cases in order to try and gain control of the property. In many cases, the burden of proof that has to be met by the state is much lower than the burden the state has to discharge to prove that someone created a crime:

The 1984 law lowered the bar for civil forfeiture. To seize property, the government had only to show probable cause to believe that it was connected to drug activity, or the same standard cops use to obtain search warrants. The state was allowed to use hearsay evidence—meaning a federal agent could testify that a drug informant told him a car or home was used in a drug transaction—but property owners were barred from using hearsay, and couldn’t even cross-examine some of the government’s witnesses. Informants, while being protected from scrutiny, were incentivized monetarily: According to the law, snitches could receive as much as one-quarter of the bounty, up to $50,000 per case.

Read the rest of this entry »

Scoring Chances for NHL Game Number 20954